Search This Blog

Respectful Insolence is a repository for the ramblings of the aforementioned pseudonymous surgeon/scientist concerning medicine and quackery, science and pseudoscience, history and pseudohistory, politics, and anything else that interests him (or pushes his buttons). Orac's motto: "A statement of fact cannot be insolent." (OK, maybe it can be just a little bit insolent.)

Why intelligent design fails

A nice, brief explanation about why intelligent design is not science and why it shouldn't be taught as such can be found here. In about 5,000 characters, PZ succinctly sums up the shortcomings of intelligent design.

Here is an open opportunity for people such as yourself to write a mythological narrative of Naturalism. It is getting difficult to find people who believe in all the mythological narratives of Naturalism. Apparently when those who do believe in Naturalism fail to support their claims they murmur something about "science" and religion as they avoid their own claims.

Ah, yes, playing the Nazi card, are you? You do realize that that's usually a sign of weakness, not strength, don't you? I'm half-tempted to invoke Godwin's Law right now.

I'm quite unimpressed by the "article" you have posted. The whole blather about "junk" DNA is naive at best (just because we didn't understand its functions before and some scientists incorrectly dismissed it as "junk" do not invalidate evolution), and Wells' suggestion that cancer may be due to a malfunction of centrosomes does NOT invalidate evolution or provide evidence for ID, even if it were true. Why? Because the end result would be chromosomal breaks and mutations. All he's doing is suggesting a different mechanism by which mutations could occur, which certainly does not "prove" intelligent design, even if true. His entire argument is a nonsequitur.

Nor am I impressed with your post. Nothing you have mentioned is incompatible with evolution, nor does it necessarily imply the existence of a "designer." For every example of exquisite "design" you postulate, I can give you counterexamples from biology of not-so-great "design" (the human appendix, various aspects of embryonic development, etc.). Your last little part about the "lil' dino" is also a distortion of evolutionary theory.

BTW, I've posted your stuff to the comments section of PZ's blog. Why don't you see if you can defend it against the real hard core evolutionary biologists that frequent there? (I notice that you didn't see fit to challenge the source material, just me.) I'll join in the fun later tonight or sometime tomorrow evening, when I have more time.

Bottom line: Whether or not there is a "designer" (be it God, extraterrestrials, or whatever) or not has not been proven, nor is there good evidence that there is.

"You do realize that that's usually a sign of weakness, not strength, don't you?"

Actually, all it is a sign of is that I am interested in historical accuracy.

"I'm half-tempted to invoke Godwin's Law right now."

That would seem to be a sign that you are truly a nerd of the Herd. At any rate, the proto-Nazi tendency towards censorship based on scientism continues, and his post was actually a pretty good exmaple of it.

"...Wells' suggestion that cancer may be due to a malfunction of centrosomes does NOT invalidate evolution or provide evidence for ID..."

Invalidating "evolution" is not the point, doing science is...and when something seems that it may be designed as an archimedian type screw to pump water or a turbine, then including making assumptions based on that in a hypothesis is one way that ID lends insight.

"Nothing you have mentioned is incompatible with evolution...

That all depends on what you mean by "evolution," as that has been used to mean anything from: "Hey, these things reproduce and stuff." to "Life came from inanimate rocks and minerals...by a series of naturalistic happenings." The simple fact is, if you are having a tough time with something as common as the fact of flight then one has to wonder at the explanatory power of Darwinism.

" For every example of exquisite "design" you postulate, I can give you counterexamples from biology of not-so-great "design"..."

"Evolutionists have seen 'odd arrangements and funny solutions' in nature and they insist these are paths a sensible designer would never tread. They are mistaken. Not only is it sensible, but message theory absolutely requires it....

We expect a designer of life to create perfect designs. Yet this expectation itself constrains a biomessage sender to do the unexpected. A world full of perfect optimal designs would form an ambiguous message. In fact, it would not look like a message at all. It would provide no clues of an intentional message. It would look precisely as expected from a designer having no such intentions. Life’s designer created life to look like a message, and therefore had to accept an astonishing design constraint: life must incorporate odd designs.How can I be so utterly sure on this point? Because evolutionists have (un knowingly) said so. In fact, they insist on it. Every one of them — from Darwin, to Ghiselin, to Gould — has emphasized how unreasonable it is for a designer to have created such non-optimal, odd structures. We can rightfully conclude that if evolutionists had the wherewithal to create life, then they would independently go forth and create optimal perfect designs. We can conclude that a world of perfect designs would look precisely like the work of multiple designers acting independently. The biomessage sender created life to look unlike the product of multiple designers, and therefore had to use odd designs.

It is not enough for a biomessage sender to merely include odd designs. All the designs together must form a pattern attributable only to a single designer. Life on earth has such a pattern.Suppose we examined many separate handwritten documents. How would we recognize they all had the same author? Answer: By the overall pattern, especially the funny quirks and odd imperfections. It is the same with living organisms.The quirks and imperfections play a key role in the pattern. They unite all organisms into a unified whole, while looking unlike the product of multiple designers. They give life the distinctive look of a single designer. They also make the pattern look like an intentional message, rather than an ordinary design effort."(The Biotic Message, By Walter ReMine :27-28)

Why do you suppose someone like PZ will have such a hard time writing narratives? They are trying to call common design, common descent, yet then they run into various problems as the pattern of Nature does not seem to comply the narrative the would like to write, again and again.

"Why don't you see if you can defend it against the real hard core evolutionary biologists that frequent there?"

Perhaps much of what I write here has already been vetted by debating the same sort of fellows. If you want to know about how they tend to think, read the first book I cited. It is more of a "biological thinking" than thinking about biology. And they tend to have a fierce dislike for the "fairy tale of the Jews" as well as the "ethical code worship of the Jews" that is based on it.

Oh, bullshit. If life were simple, stripped-down, and optimized, you'd be talking about how obviously someone designed that because look how well it was done!

>All the designs together must>form a pattern attributable only>to a single designer. Life on>earth has such a pattern.

Which is, what, exactly? The only pattern I see is that things grow until they die. Death due to predation, sickness, lack of resources, but death is the only thing that stops the expansion of life. The concept of invasive species bins the whole concept of life having a pattern.

PS the fact that other people share your stupidity does not mean that it is actually smart.

Yes, mynym seems to be the type of person who thinks he can drown you in a deluge of impressive-sounding, but ultimately meaningless verbiage. His example of the avian wing as "evidence" for "intelligent design" is old and has been debunked on talk.origins many times. As for the whole centromere/motor concept, I have yet to see how, even if it turned out to be true, it would be evidence for design or how its idea came from design. All it would be is a different mechanism for genomic instability leading to cancer. Interesting, but it would not be evidence for design, nor would it be evidence against evolution.

Orac is but a humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. That Orac has chosen his pseudonym based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights from an old British SF show whose special effects were renowned for their early 1980's BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction for television ever produced, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.) Orac tries to keep his insolence respectful, but admittedly sometimes fails in the cases of obvious quackery and pseudoscience, attacks on him, very poor critical thinking skills, bigotry, and just general plain stupidity.